I'm currently playing as vanu on ceres with nomads, but not recording since I want to maximise my fps. But I uploaded a decent sniper streak with Smurf Assault Squad [SAS] on one of the last days of beta. One of the only clips I recorded since it lowers frame rate enough to hurt my gameplay. This was made to testing video editing on windows 7, expect videos of other games like darkfall UW soonish!

Sunday, 2 December 2012

Although still in beta and fairly unfinished, as far as I'm concerned Salem is already the best true sandbox MMO on the market. Bear in mind this permadeath game is more about complex sandbox gameplay and not constant PvP. However I played alot of Salem's alpha and beta already, enough to burn myself out until there is some serious new content.

Today another small patch; "Rooting thy Native Oak" was added to the beta, mainly just adding tree planting and claim upkeep. Not tons, but important if your (like me) considering to take the opportunity to declaim your land claim and get refunded the silver cost!

My first ever home in Salem, during the alpha so some textures were missing.

On 28th of november aventurine posted a Brawler Skirmisher video, along with an announcement of adding UW to steam greenlight. On Friday 30th novemebr aventurine posted a Air Elementalist video, and UW got greenlit on steam already! The air elementalist blog also mentions opposing schools, I have put an update on my previous info breakdown post. Tasos also did an live stream interview with mmorpg.com posted below, which was long, but an interesting listen and we learned some very important things.

There were discussions about things such as darkfalls philosophy on instancing and friendly fire, and confirmation of things we were previously told about. My personal summary of new and important things we learned:

Friday, 30 November 2012

New dev blog posted on the upcomming standalone re-release of ubermod DayZ. Well worth reading, it details their current focus on changing the engine archecture. The "turns DayZ from an FPS into a true MMO" part had me especially excited. http://dayzdev.tumblr.com/post/36771692833/dev-report-november-2012You can also tell rocket is a valve and mojang fanboy ;) personally i'm ok with having to use steam just for the much needed VAC (valve anti cheat).

Monday, 26 November 2012

Update: due to new info 30/11 we now know that there are still opposing schools and there are no primalists are release, this means my 192 figure is way off. see edit 2 for details.

This article is an in-depth breakdown of info on Unholy Wars mostly focused on the recent interface dev diary posted below. Some of the info discussed is obvious, but some is new and interesting, that I doubt anyone else has figured out. I've managed to calculate some interesting things such as starting and endgame health pools, 192 class specialisations. Also since I last blogged about darkfall there has been a Fire elementalist video, and Battle brand warrior video which are both worth watching.

Wednesday, 21 November 2012

Project Reality posted a new "Devcast", a podcast with videos and developer commentary about the upcoming 1.0 version of the mod. You can see some of the new sounds and animations, which i'll be honest are only really exciting if you are already a fan of the game.

I really cannot wait for the 1.0 version of the bf2 mod project reality. Its difficult to explain in a short space of time, why you should care about a mod of such an ancient game. So I'm not even going to try right now, maybe when the big update comes out. For now lets just say gameplay > graphics. And it has some emergent gameplay like nothing else. I recommend watching some gameplay videos if curious. I made a quick, not so serious one myself recently;

Thursday, 15 November 2012

Today is the last day the servers will be running Darkfall, which is its prime was the best mmorpg I ever had the privilege to play. Darkfall was not without its many flaws and shortcommings, which was why the game never saw population growth and slowly died out.

A new version of darkfall hoping to correct past mistakes, improve the game and give it more mass appeal whilst still hopefully keeping the same hardcore core gameplay, has been in development for at least 3 years. This version now called Unholy Wars, was earlier slated for a 20/11/12 release, but has now been delayed somewhat to 12/12/12. However since this content was at one point called "Darkfall 2010" the delay is unsurprising to most the existing community.

Wednesday, 14 November 2012

Life is Feudal promises to be the closest thing to my dream game, which is basically a mix of Haven & Hearth with Mount & Blade. A medieval sandbox MMO, where players build the game world and fight for control of it. This game got my avid attention after watching very impressive pre alpha videos, such as the one below:

Do note that this video is over a year old and well before any funding was secured. The game is entering alpha this December with no NDA, which I think is a bold but good move. I've been invited to alpha test and as there is no NDA hopefully I can post some gameplay videos and such soon. Although bear in mind that alpha is alpha, I will try to show only the good and working parts of the game. Alpha tests are technical tests, not gameplay tests like beta. And such an ambitious Indy game is bound to be very bare bones.

Feel free to check out the website; lifeisfeudal.com for more info and some impressive screenshots.